Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Essex Street, New York

Press Release:

Text by Andrew Blackley

• Some exhibitions of sculpture display arrayed objects, others exhibitions unfold more like a game. In such a game some works will, invariably, extend beyond proven rules. Others will work to subvert limits. One could say that the objective of the field of sculpture (which is itself another game, the game of assuming the all-else, the everything-but) is not to manifest or perform material; nor is its objective to locate the viewing (or making) subject within a matrices of form. It could be said instead that sculpture engenders the spatiality necessary from which the subject constantly slips away.

In this exhibition, sculptures are less one thing after another than the rhetoric embraced in the connection (and repulsion) between things. Opposing seriality (the all-but—and everything-else—of one thing after another), we might begin to see sculpture as sequence outright. •

• If sculpture is to have an opposite, it might be science. If science is to have an opposite, it might be the unknown. Rhetoric is a path for when we choose to access the unknown. For science, rhetoric is utilized when designing, culling, and analyzing data for theories and further experiments. As artworks emerge from the studio, so do too results from the experiment. Most work, though we understand the limits of workability when the ends of the spectrum begin to circle back: a Type-I error falsely infers the presence of something that is absent while a Type-II error falsely infers the absence of something that is present. (Type-I error = false positive. Type-II error = false negative.) We know better, but all of a sudden science is beginning to sound a lot like sculpture.

We create new ground by identifying an additional outcome (~ effect) a new error, an outlier of negativity, which in doing so imagines, and implies, a new enlivened experimental space (~ cause). A Type-III error would be a result that would falsely infer states of being discrete; separate; distinct; not joined to, or incorporated with, another—a.k.a a Type-III error might falsely infer that: Some Things’ Factuality is centered around Ubiety (…STFU 2?). The space it would
inversely reflect, but never represent, might too be the unknown. •
• Relationality expects incompatibility. Indifference commands contradictions. These conversions represent two harmonies produced from the works constituting this exhibition. Transacting upon—traversing between—works occur within multiple discordant registers that together reproduce new platforms for difference-building. •

• Compositions require composite elements. What is complete in itself cannot be added to, linked to, joined to, or combined with. Thereby the occurrence of a supplement can only occur when there is an originary lack. The second can be argued to be in existence so as to fill an originary—and essential—lack in the first. (We live in topsy-turvy times; it’s worth pointing out anew that the first can be argued to be in existence so as to fill an originary—and essential—lack in
the second.) Supplementation is less collage than the filament from which a net is knot. Below are four recent castings of the supplement, culled from works and exhibitions previously-revealed to the listening public:

Torey Thornton Supplement Method A: “Sliding Around”
When You Look in Eyes You Can Only Look… November 18, 2017 – January 6, 2018 (Moran Bondaroff, LA)…“All things on a spectrum and sliding around in relation and context, a Subaru Baja next to any Tesla, a Tesla next to a Tank.”…

Torey Thornton Supplement Method B: “Pinpoint” Sir Veil’s Faux Outing June 24 – September 9, 2018 (Jeffrey Stark, NY) …“By analysing passages in the Bible, many believe they have been able to pinpoint the world will end – and that is June 24, 2018.”… (note: Torey Thornton has been alive 10,396 dates before June 24, 2018 and 201 days following.) Torey Thornton Supplement Method C: “Several At Once” …“It takes years to have the statements speak clearly but most people would rather fast-forward or tell you what your statements are versus waiting for you to finish speaking. I’ve realized that instead of moving in a straight line I move more up and down, sideways and backwards in order to pull in the necessary information to support whatever I’m working on at the time. My practice isn’t one long narrative, it’s more related to several streams of thought overlapping and interacting at once, how the brain generally works.”… -Torey Thornton (2018, Cultured Magazine)

• Sliding around, pinpointing, simultaneous occupation of (or being occupied by) several at once: each are methods that reject singularity. Everything-else-ness defies circumnavigation, it denounces the wholeness that would produce gravity, it defers from stable, formed orbits, and differs from ______. The time is right to study modes of existence through the scaffolding which supports it: overlapping axioms dually prove themselves and their environment. For if repetition produces abstraction, if truth is seen as fabrication of reality: if labor is truth, whose truth might be repeated? •

Torey Thornton was born in Macon, Georgia. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Galerie Neu, Berlin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Misako & Rosen, Tokyo; Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong; Aishti Foundation, Beirut; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels and elsewhere. Thornton has made solo exhibitions at Jeffery Stark, New York; Morán Morán, Los Angeles; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London and Karma, New York. Later this year Thornton will hold an exhibition at The Power Station in Dallas.

An interview between the artist and Andrew Blackley is featured in the current issue of Cultured Magazine.